Originally Posted by
emvchip
It's a bit more than that...cards can't be duplicated/used easily. As a result, a huge category of card present fraud has largely gone away, and many big issuers don't even require foreign travel notifications anymore. Sure it's not perfect, fraudsters can try to force magnetic stripe acceptance, but it's far more difficult than it used to be for the carding fraud rings.
Agreed on the security improvements. I was referring more to how PIN
still isn't required (and likely never will be for reasons discussed hundreds of times before) plus how a large number of places still run cards for customers vs. having customers do the inserting or tapping. If it was just PIN not being required but we got everything else Europe, etc. have (e.g. ubiquitous contactless acceptance and near 100% pay at the table at restaurants), I could live with that.
(In fact, just the other day the In-N-Out drive-thru person tapped my card for me instead of handing the terminal out the window. And I know they're able to do the latter, too, as they did so for about a six month stretch during the pandemic. I'm sure if I said I wanted to use "Apple Pay" they'd have done so, but still.)